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Monthly Archives: September 2006

I got an official statement from youtube that my youtube app does not confirm to the youtube terms of use. So i made a camtasia record to show it here. I think this app shows well how Flex and Zinc can be combined for rapid application development and it`s a nice example of an occasionally connected client. I hope that the same type of applications will also be possible with apollo. Here a the key feautures:
– Search Youtube
– Display Videos in a Custom (not Youtube) Player.
– Save Videos Offline
– Organize downloaded Videos in categories
– Export downloaded Videos to ordinary AVI files and save them on your machine.

I hope that youtube will make their service more open soon. I think one big point at the moment is that they need to place their ads and such an app prevents this. Maybe they could open the service under the restriction that you display ads from them in your app. Those ads could be updated everytime the app goes online.

I`ve developed a little Flex/Zinc application that allows to search Youtube Videos and display them without the Youtube Player. You can than download the videos and watch and organize them offline. The app also allows you to convert those videos to other formats (e.g. simple avi`s). It even has a little download manager that allows to control multiple downloads. This has become such a handy little app that shows well the power of flex that i would like to add it here as a download. I`m unsure if i`m allowed to do this? Does anyone knows if youtube will allows this?

Yesterday i installed Microsoft MAX. It`s the first app from Microsoft that uses WPF. I really like it but the first thing i thought was: “This can all be done in Flex too!” I especially liked the way the images reorder when you scale them. So back from work i tried it in Flex. I took the hybrid store example from adobe as a starting point.

Try scaling the images with the slider on the right and use the Devider and see what happens with the images. Also try to rescale your browser window. It is really easy to do such things with flex. It took about 20 minutes to do this (can you do this in ajax in this time?). It`s really just a rough sketch and if anyone improves it please leave a comment.
What i really like about Wpf is that it will become easier to sell Flex/Flash based apps because soon (when does Vista arrives?) normal desktop apps will look like Flex/Flash apps 😉

I found a nice solution for playing flv files in slowmotion. You basically play the original video and store BitmapData Objects while it`s playing in an Array. Than you can just show these stored BitmapData Objects in at a given intervall slower than the original flv is playing. You just need to store the difference between what has been showed and were the original flv playhead is. This way the RAM increase is not too big.

Having all those nice tools like Flex Data Services, the new Socket class… lying around and playing with them localy i would like to bring it to the web. For now i just have a “standard” hosting package that just offers me php5. Does anyone can recommend a not to expensive hosting company that allows me to install all those tools. I would need a tomcat, be allowed to run my own SocketServer and install extensions like the open transaction manager.
Thanks for any advise.